I’m told that IE is being phased out on Mac, and you’re not alone in having difficulties making it work. I recently contacted a London-based webdesigner for help, and every site he gave to showcase his work was all mixed up and half way up the screen!
Sorry not to be of more help. Good luck!

It’s definitely dying. I do know some people who use it on a daily basis; they work for a nonprofit, and they have some iMacs which won’t run OS X. Until they can afford to upgrade, they’re pretty much stuck with IE. So professionally, I stick to techniques which don’t totally break in IE, even if they don’t look perfect. (Lightstalkers is an example.) That means table-based layouts, and avoiding complicated javascript/css navigation systems.

My advice is to do a little ad-hoc research on the people for whom you want your site to look good; if they’re all photo editors with G5s, then you probably don’t need to worry about IE.

Anyway, what problems are you having? If you post a link to your redesign, I can try to make suggestions…

IE for Mac is no longer being updated as Mirosoft said they would abandon it as soon as Apple released Safari so you’d best forget it alltogether. When I was testing my design in the various browsers IE was a disaster and so I didn’t bother.

ok ladies and gents, thanks for the advice, I wont spend as much time on it as i thought i should….seems to work fine in all other browsers and IE6 on PC is fine….I appreciate the help….all the more so because I will be able to have a glass or two tonight now!!

Shinji’s approach is, I think, the most fruitful having worked with him and this approach in the past. I usually make my pages as standards compliant as is practical – and knowing who your audience is and what technology they have will define what practical is.

That said, often a lot, but certainly not all css layouts can ‘degrade gracefully’. I put that up in quotes, because this is a vague and ill-defined concept that mostly refers to layout elements not being hidden or destroyed on older browsers or on browsers you don’t test a whole lot with. Nevertheless, as long as that is your least criteria and as long as you watch a few things, not the least of which is colors (try to avoid having white text and a white background, in case they wind on top of one another in some random browser, for example), your pages should be OK.

Just in case anyone noticed this and was too polite to point it out — Lightstalkers looks looked batty crackers in Internet Explorer on the Mac. Apparently IE 5.2 is not so crazy about leading spaces in CSS class declarations. I believe it’s mostly fixed now.